Internal Family Systems Theory

This episode was pre recorded as part of a live continuing education webinar on demand. CEUs are still available for this presentation through all CEUs register@allceus.com counselortoolbox you I'd like to welcome everybody to today's presentation on internal Family systems theory. Today is just going to be a really, really brief introduction. IFS is a really in depth theory, but I've had a lot of people ask for an overview on it because they've heard about it and they're not really sure what it is. So that's really what we're going to be talking about today. And I will give you some resources that you can go to for further training if you want to pursue internal Family systems theory as a intervention in your practice. But today we're just going to explain the principles in general of internal family systems theory, discuss the concepts of parts in IFS and explore ways to use IFS in counseling. The self helpleadership.org website and I'm not affiliated with them at all but they are the ones that provide training programs for internal family systems theory. Your in depth training and we will certainly be you will certainly be able to get additional training if you want to use it. From selfleadership.org so IFS was developed in the 1990s by family therapist Richard Schwartz. It's based on the concept that an undamaged core self is the essence of who you are and identifies three different types of subpersonalities or families that reside within each person in addition to the self. So we have different parts of our self and different theories of counseling and mental health refer to these different parts as different things. But today we're going to call them parts. Wounded and suppressed parts are called exiles. In addictions theory. Sometimes we call those the lost child, but these are people who or families within the person that have been hurt and they bring about feelings of vulnerability. Managers are families within the person that keep the exiled parts suppressed. And firefighters are families within the person that distract the self from the pain of the exiled parts. Internal Family Systems center for Self Leadership conducts training programs that can help you understand these a lot more and exactly how to do the things that we're going to talk about today. So the basic assumptions of internal family systems therapy, which I'm going to call IFS henceforth just because the other is a big mouthful, the mind is subdivided into an indeterminate number of subpersonalities or parts. So you can have multiple firefighters, you can have multiple managers. Everyone has a self which can lead the individual's internal system. So you have this overarching self, if you want to think of it as the CEO, and then you have these subparts which you can think of as the vice presidents, if you will. Non extreme parts. Each part is supposed to be that they have a function and they're not supposed to be extreme or overly dominant. They're not supposed to be this vice president that comes in and micromanages everything and tells everybody to shut up. They're the ones who are willing to work together. And we want all of the families or all of the parts to work together to make the person or help the person be all that they can be. So the non extreme intention of each part is something positive for the individual. There are no bad parts, there are just extreme parts. Just like a lot of our behaviors, any of our behaviors, if taken to an extreme, can be unhealthy. Anything that we eat, like pizza, I love pizza and I can tell you that pizza has every single food group represented. But I digress. Eating pizza as my only food every single day, that is not a good choice. Pizza is not a bad food necessarily. But if I eat it to exclusion, if it becomes an extreme component of my diet, then it could become unhealthy. The goal of therapy is not to eliminate the parts, but instead to help them find their non extreme roles. We'll stick with pizza because I'm hungry. The goal of therapy using this analogy would not be to completely eliminate pizza from my diet because it's not harmful to me. I don't have gluten intolerance or anything. But instead of having it be the only thing I eat, have it be something that I eat as a treat or something that I eat once a week instead of for every meal. As we develop, our parts develop and form a complex system of interactions among themselves. Now, we're going to switch analogies here. I want you to think of an actual family with, you know, mom, dad, 2.4 kids and a dog, whatever that family. When mom and dad got together and, you know, maybe got married, that family developed that way. And then when the first child was added in, it changed the structure of that family relationship. And then when the other kid was added in, it again changed the structure of that relationship. Our parts are very similar and we're going to talk about that when the system is reorganized. When we help the manager not feel like it has to be in total control all the time, or the firefighter, we help the firefighter feel like the manager and the self have things under control. So you don't need to be on high alert all the time. Then those parts can stand down and reorganize pretty rapidly and just kind of take a breath. Changes in the internal system. So changes in the way people are thinking and feeling and reacting will affect changes in the external system and vice versa. So if I, for example, have an overactive firefighter or an extreme firefighter, and that firefighter is just doing everything it can to extinguish painful feelings like addictive behaviors, then that's going to affect my external system. Likewise, you know, I may have things under control and my firefighter is chilled out for a little while. I feel like I'm in recovery. But then something happens in my external system and I am triggered and that firefighter jumps back to the four again. We need to recognize that, and we've talked about that in other theories, that our feelings, thoughts, interactions and interpretations affect how we perceive the world and how we interact with the world. And the world affects our perceptions. Subpersonalities are aspects of our personality that interactions internally in sequences and styles that are similar to the ways in which people interact. The exile and the manager may interact. Remember, the exile is the hurt or traumatized part and the manager is trying to help the person function in day to day life. So the person, the manager may be telling the exile, you need to be quiet. This is not the time to focus on you right now. We need to focus on getting our work done. Or the firefighter maybe, you know, putting out blazes and encouraging the person, triggering the urge to use substances, for example. And the self, which is the overarching part, or the manager, you know, depending on the situation, may be telling the firefighter, you know what, yes, it's painful, but we don't need to escape from that right now. We can endure the pain. Parts may be experienced in any number of ways, including thoughts, feelings, sensations, images and more. We're going to define each part in just a second. All parts want something positive for the individual and will use a variety of strategies to gain influence within the internal system. Now think about how this works in families. You know, actual mom, dad, brother, sister, families. As that same dynamic may be happening in your head. Or if you don't want to think about family, think about a workplace. You know, everybody in the workplace theoretically wants the workplace to survive because they want to keep getting a paycheck, but they're going to. Each person in that workplace may kind of jockey for position, jockey to get the boss's ear. Parts that become extreme in ifs are referred to as carrying burdens, they're carrying the weight of the word burdens world on their shoulders because those parts don't trust the self or the other parts to operate in the individual's best interest. When people start carrying burdens, when parts start carrying burdens, these are energies that are not helpful, such as extreme beliefs, emotions, or fantasies. For example, a burden manager may be one that becomes extremely rigid and micromanaging. A burdened firefighter may be one that just sees danger everywhere and is constantly trying to put out fires and at whatever cost to the person. A burdened exile is one that is so traumatized and in so much pain and is trying to get her voice heard, but feels like she just can't get anybody to recognize her. Parts can be helped to unburden or recognize their role and return to the natural balance. So we want to see that, yes, occasionally we do need the firefighter. We occasionally do need to suppress emotions, use defense mechanisms, because it's not always appropriate to feel and express an emote in the moment. We all need managers who can be there to help us use our wise mind, if you want to use that term. The manager is the one that's going to try to direct things to prevent problems. It's going to say, you know what, you may not want to try that because it's probably going to stress you out. Managers are preventive, preventative. Managers don't want you to go into a situation that's going to trigger distress. Firefighters are reactive. When you start to experience distress, the firefighters like, hello, I'm going to put out the fire. Parts that have lost trust in the leadership of the self may blend with or take over the self again. The self is supposed to be the overarching the CEO, if you will. And if the firefighter has lost trust in the self, then it may take over. It may go, well, self, Mr. CEO, you don't know what you're doing, so I'm going to go ahead and start taking over because you just can't seem to manage this situation. So let's talk a little bit more about each one of these parts. And I started with exiles because the manager and the firefighter are both designed to keep the exile at bay, to keep the person from feeling vulnerable and distressed. Exiles are young parts that have experienced trauma and become isolated or suppressed in an effort to protect individuals from feeling the pain, terror, or fear from their past. Now, we all have traumatic experiences in our life. I mean, they may not rise to the level of ptsd, but we all have traumatic Experiences. We all have places where we have been wounded in our past. These are memories that we have, things that disappointed us or hurt us or whatever. These are the exiles. Now once we come to terms with those experiences and accept them and integrate them and recognize that they have helped shape who we are, then we've given a voice to those exiles. So they say, you know, when I was six and so, and so Caregiver abandoned the family, I felt responsible and I felt, you know, very vulnerable and for what happened. And I understand now why I react when I feel like I'm going to be abandoned. And I can deal with that now. So exiles inform us about where we've come from. It doesn't mean they're informing us of the, of the present. If you want to think of a psycho from a psychodynamic perspective, exiles often hold on to extreme feelings and, or beliefs that come, that become isolated from the rest of the system, such as, I'm worthless, I must be successful to be lovable, and I'm a failure. If exiles are young parts that are holding extreme feelings, remember that young people think dichotomously and egocentrically and personalize a lot of stuff. So these thoughts and cognitive distortions, if you want to pull from other theories that we hold on to that have never been checked or questioned, are part of the exiles. So when we start working with the exiles, eventually we're going to be addressing some of these thought patterns and extreme feelings. Exiles become increasingly extreme and desperate as they look for opportunities to emerge and tell their stories. They're saying, hey, you know, hey, somebody's got to deal with this. With a lot of people that we work with and maybe with ourselves, just depending on who you are, you may have that wounded inner child in there. You may have things in your past that you still have not accepted or come to terms with. These are your exiles. These are things that need to be integrated. Exiles want to be cared for and loved and constantly seek someone to rescue and redeem them. Exiles feel rejected, which they. They feel like they're not good enough. They feel hurt and we want to help them feel better. And the manager can help the exile feel better. If, you know, just like when a child falls down and gets a boo boo on their knee, you know, mom can come along and help them feel better. Can they heal the knee? No, it's going to take time to do that. But the manager or the mom can help the exile tell their story and start to feel better. Exiles that are not helped are likely to leave the individual Feeling fragile and vulnerable. So the firefighter is going to try to suppress and squish and quiet and cease the exile. The manager is going to try to control the exile into being quiet. But when the exiles are not being controlled or suppressed and they're also not integrated, then the person can feel fragile and vulnerable. As I said before, managers are proactive. They try to avoid interactions or situations that might activate an exile's attempt to break out or leak feelings, heaven forbid, or memories into consciousness. Managers are trying to control everything. Now remember, the self is the overarching, and the self is able to say, you know what, manager, thank you for trying to protect me, but it's okay to feel some of these feelings. I don't have to control or suppress all my feelings. Different managers adopt different strategies, such as controlling perfectionism, codependency, and their primary function is to keep the exiles exiled to protect the person from getting into any situation that could trigger past memories or feelings of hurt. Common managerial behaviors include controlling perfectionism, high criticism, and think about a manager in an organization who's trying to manage a department, and they don't understand why people aren't listening or they don't want to hear the dissension. They just want what they want to be done to be done. So they may become extremely micromanaging and controlling on the other side, you know, they may become extremely people pleasing because they want to be accepted. They may avoid risks, they may be pessimistic and constantly striving to achieve. So we want to look at behaviors that people are exhibiting when they come into counseling and asking what would trigger the exiles and how can that be prevented? Common managerial symptoms include emotional detachment, panic attacks, somatic complaints, depressive episodes, and hyper vigilance. When a manager isn't able to control. When a manager starts to feel out of control, then they start to feel out of control. So they may detach emotionally. And because they can't or don't want to engage with that exile, they don't want to engage with that vulnerable part. They're just saying, I see that you're hurting, I see that you're crying, I see that, whatever, but I ain't got time for that right now. So they've got the emotional detachment. Firefighters have the same goal as managers to keep the exiles away, but different strategies. Managers want the person to look good and be approved of. And remember, it's that vice president that really wants their department to look really good to the CEO. Firefighters don't care how the department looks. They just want to Distract from the pain. So they're often in conflict. Think about when it comes to audit time. You know, you have two different types of supervisors. You have the manager who wants everything to be just so for the auditors. And you have the firefighters that are wanting to distract and just they want to find the three best charts to turn in so nobody looks any deeper. Firefighters often conflict with managers. The managers are saying, you really should do this, that and the other, and this is what needs to happen. And the firefighters are saying, no, I don't care, this is too painful, I got to go. Firefighters are reactive and automatically activated when an exiled part is activated. When the exiles, when the pain is triggered, the managers are trying to prevent pain, they're trying to prevent the exiles from being triggered. When the managers fail and the person starts to feel pain, starts to get dysphoric, the firefighter jumps in. And this can be when the person feels rejection, isolation, failure, or even has traumatic memories that come out. The firefighters function is to eliminate the dysphoric feelings, thoughts, sensations and memories without regard for the consequences. In acceptance and commitment therapy we talk about this as autopilot. These are the things that use people's energy, that often move them away from what's most important to them. Firefighters are reactive and often, if you want to use DBT terminology, are acting in the emotional mind. The person is in pain, they're in distress, they're just trying to make a stop. Firefighters can do this in any number of ways, including using alcohol or drugs, self mutilation, cutting, non suicidal, self injury, binge eating, compulsive sexuality, anything that will distract them and make them feel better generally doesn't address the problem. It is simply a distraction or suppression technique. The self, the CEO, the moderator that the parts are all talking to and the self can either like or dislike, listen to or shut out various parts. Now think about a C level executive meeting that you've been to and that's exactly what the CEO does. You know, maybe they, they'll listen to each individual vice president. Other times they don't want to hear the vice president's explanations. They're like, you just need to get it done. When differentiated, the self is competent, secure, self assured, relaxed and able to listen and respond to feedback from all parts of their psyche, from all of the subparts. When they're not differentiated, then the self has more difficulty and is not nearly as relaxed because they're trying, the self is trying to regain control. They have this runaway vice president who's just kind of off doing his own thing and not using the system resources to move towards the system goals. The self can and should lead the internal system. People have various levels of experiencing the self when it's completely differentiated from all parts. People describe a feeling of being centered. They don't feel overly impulsive, they don't feel overly like they've got to control everything. They don't feel overly hurting. You know, they're able to experience a wide range of emotions without having to impulsively react. When the individual is in self or when the self is in the lead while interacting with the others in day to day experiences, it can be experienced along with the non extreme aspects of the self. The self can say, okay, I want to hear from vice president manager, what are your thoughts here? How do we need to address this situation? Okay, I want to hear from vice president firefighter, what are your thoughts? You know, what is your generally impulse? What are your urges right now? And I want to hear from vice president exile, why are you hurting right now? Tell me what is scary or what is threatening or what is being triggered. An empowering aspect of the model is that everyone has a self. The three goals of IFS are to free the parts from their extreme roles so each part can add their input to restore the trust in self and to coordinate and harmonize the self and the parts so they can work together as a team with the self in charge. Now remember, the managers are, if you want to think of it this way, kind of the rational mind. They provide guidance on how to prevent problems. They're not concerned with the feelings. You know, they're, they're over here. The firefighters are more the emotional mind. And typically we want them to learn how to start using healthier coping strategies to deal with the stress and to trust the self. When the self says, I can tolerate a little bit of distress when they're extreme, the firefighters say, I must not feel any pain. I have to stop feeling this way right now. When they're unburdened, then they can say, okay, I trust self that you'll call on me if you need me. But for now I'm going to let us experience a little bit of this and let the exile start sharing what's going on. Exiles when they're operating in an unburdened way, recognize the influence of the past and the reality of the present and the self integrates advice from all of these experiences and feelings and makes an executive decision. Should we avoid it? Do we need to suppress it? Can we tolerate it? Where's this coming from? Is it truly a threat right now? So how do we use this model? First, we want to assess the client's parts and sequences around the problem. What are the different parts saying about this particular problem? Maybe they're having a relationship issue, maybe they're having problems at work, maybe they're depressed. What are the client's parts saying? For example, in depression, when somebody is clinically depressed, the manager maybe identifying all these triggers for depression and going, you know what, you just can't take anymore. You need to stay inside and just avoid other people and avoid any other input so you don't get overwhelmed, you know, that's all. And the firefighters going, I can't stand to feel depressed this way anymore. I need to have a drink or I need to whatever. And then the exile is down there going, does anybody not want to know why we're depressed? Does anyone, buddy, want to know why we feel helpless right now? We want to check for an individual's awareness of parts. Ask how the person experiences each part in terms of thoughts, feelings, sensations, images and so on. So when the manager is in control, when the part of them that's working to prevent them from feeling harm, when that person is in control, how are you thinking? What are your thought processes? Like, what do you feel like when the firefighter is desperately trying to suppress the pain? When you are, you know, engaging in non suicidal self injury or something, what are the thoughts, feelings, sensations, images? When the exile is hurting and starting to emerge, the firefighter is not able to suppress it. The manager wasn't able to prevent it. Now you are really starting to hurt. What are your thoughts, feelings, sensations, images, etc. You want, when you listen to them, you want to look for polarizations. For example, in anorexia you might have an extreme manager. People with anorexia tend to want to control everything because they feel like they are in control of nothing. And if they control everything, then they don't have like especially what they eat and how their body behaves. Then they have less fear of becoming fat. Substance abuse is an extreme firefighter. When substance abuse, you are just suppressing emotions, you're not dealing with it, you are just making that hurt go away because you cannot deal with it. In clinical depression, anxiety or ptsd, this may be an extreme exile. Where the exile is going, I am totally helpless and hopeless and I don't know how to feel any better. I don't know how to prevent it, I don't know how to get better. Interestingly, the way you relate to your own parts parallels the Way you relate to parts of others. So if you don't know how you relate to own parts, you might want to look at how you relate to parts of others. How does your exile interact with the exile of others? So how do your hurt parts interact with other people who are hurting? When you think about going to a support group, how does your manager interact with the exile of others? Does your manager want to help them and nurture them and scaffold them? Or does your manager want to not even engage with them because it's, you know, overwhelming and they want to prevent experiencing pain? Or does your fire. How does your firefighter interact with the exile of others? Does your firefighter want to suppress their pain, just make them be able to ignore it or not feel it? The individual's internal system affects and is affected by the external system, and they often parallel each other the way you deal with life. If your self is allowing your firefighter to be extreme, or if the firefighter has become extreme, then suppression activities may be more what you do in your real life. Instead of dealing with problems or preventing problems, you may just try to suppress problems. So we do want to look at how do these processes parallel internal reality and external reality. When you start to use the model you're working with families, remember each part is considered a family. Check for the family's awareness of parts in self and others. Is your manager aware of your firefighter? Does your manager know that when things get out of control, your firefighter engages in impulsive behaviors? Is your manager aware of other people's firefighters? Can they see when other people are suppressing emotions because they feel overwhelmed? Make a decision about how to begin using the model with the client. What kind of language are we going to use? Are we going to talk about firefighters, managers, exiles? How are we going to approach this? Address, assess fears of the manager parts, and value the roles of managers. Remember, the manager is the one that tries to prevent harm. So if somebody's coming into counseling, that's, you know, generally we expect in counseling we're going to go to some places that are uncomfortable, and the manager is probably digging his heels in going, oh, no, that's not a good idea. So we want to talk about the fears of the manager. What are you afraid of will happen if you're not in control? If you can't prevent us from feeling overwhelmed, if you can't prevent the exiles from coming out? The manager may be afraid of the firefighter because the manager knows that he can't control the firefighter. I don't know we have to talk to the different, talk to the manager, talk to the person and ask what are their fears. We want to explain how therapy can work without the manager's feared outcomes happening. You know, we don't have to push so far that that firefighter is triggered. We can start by working with the firefighter to develop some distress tolerance techniques and working with the manager to develop some distress tolerance techniques so the firefighter doesn't feel like he has to be engaged immediately. We want to inventory dangerous behaviors and work with the manager's fears about triggering firefighters if one of the firefighting behaviors is non suicidal self injury. If you think back to dbt, which predates this model, it's important to make sure that the person has other skills in the repertoire and they're safe before you start poking the bear. We don't want to let the exiles out and have the person feel emotional discontrol until we know that they have a strategy for dealing with it that is healthy and safe. We want to assess the client's external context and constraints to doing this work. If they are in a really chaotic conflictual environment, you know, how are we going to approach that? Because we really want to get them in a place where they trust that the self they the self trust that the manager can help them prevent feeling overwhelmed, trust that the manager will be able to help them identify when is time to say when where they can trust the the firefighter is activated that he will engage healthier coping mechanisms. We need to make sure that this is possible. If you've got somebody, for example, who is struggling with alcohol addiction, that firefighter, if he has access to alcohol, that is really a dangerous place to be. So in the external context, can the person get to a place where, you know they don't have their firefighter doesn't have access to those tools. Can they get to a place in their external environment where they actually are safe, allowing those exiles to come out. Sometimes, you know, think about a single parent or something who has a lot of stress going on, is working two jobs and has to keep it together and can't miss a day of work and you know, that person is. Their external environment is really making it difficult to have the ability to feel vulnerable at all. So we do want to assess their external environment. It is important to assess the protective parts, the managers and firefighters, and work with them first. This creates safety. So you want to develop a direct relationship with the part. So when you're talking to somebody, you can either talk to them about, okay, you know, let's work with your manager today. How is your manager going to prevent things from getting worse? How is your manager going to prevent problems this week? How is your manager going to help you as we start to do this difficult work? Because the manager wants to control things and prevent problems. Firefighters, we want to talk with them too. Again, realizing that they have a functional role, they have a benevolent role. They're trying to help the person when everything else is failing from feeling completely overwhelmed. We want to validate them and say, thank you for being there. Now, what strategies do you have that you can use? And let's talk about. How do you know when you need to be activated instead of automatically being activated? How can the self let you know when you need to get involved? You may need to negotiate the pace of work and give each part an opportunity to talk about concerns. So if you're experiencing in the therapeutic relationship resistance, most likely that manager is feeling uneasy, and they're not trusting the self. They're feeling like you're pushing too hard. And if they let go of control, then everything's gonna kind of dissolve and the firefighter is gonna jump into action, and, you know, all hell's gonna break loose. So that's resistance the manager may not trust. Relapse may be the firefighter. You know, you're going along, and then the person starts to feel some feelings, and the firefighter jumps the gun, and they say, you know what? Oh, we shouldn't be feeling these, so I'm gonna jump in. And that can indicate a relapse. Now, relapse, remember, can be any sort of emotions or behaviors, but we want to negotiate the pace of work. We don't want the person to feel overwhelmed to the point where they need to engage in those firefighter behaviors. And we don't want the person to feel anxious or scared to the extent that they are resisting what we're trying to do. We want them to lead the process. So we want to have a frank discussion with them about what does that need to look like? You need to work out a system for each part to let you know when things are moving too fast and respect the concerns of the part. So if the person starts talking about having a lot of urges to drink, and alcohol is the easiest example to use for this, Then we want to talk with that firefighter. We want to say, okay, what's going on here? You're really showing up a lot more than usual lately. So, you know, what is making you feel dysphoric or uneasy or what do you see happening once you Have a relationship with the manager and the firefighter and you feel like things are going along and you've got a plan. Then you can start working with the exiles and helping them tell their story and become empowered and integrated into the system. Non imaging techniques we want to assess an internal dialogue. You can locate a sense of a part in the body. So where do you feel your firefighter? You know, you may feel your firefighter in your chest or in your stomach. A lot of times we feel our manager in our head. Where is it that you feel that particular part? And you can feel different parts in the same place. You can feel the exile in your heart, you can feel the exile in your gut. And you can make diagrams for people to see the relationships among their parts. You know, how do the firefighter and exile get along? To assess the internal dialogue, we want to have people do a variety of things depending on the person. Some people will like journaling. So ask them, what is the exile, manager, firefighter and self saying or want to do about this situation. Get input from all four of them, you know, or the self and ask the other three. You can have direct access where the therapist could talk just to the part and you can say, okay, let me just talk to the manager for a second. Let me just talk to your. To your. What's the word I'm looking for? Your objective mind. You can have the self talk to the parts and ask the parts what they're saying and what is the self's reaction to this. And we do this a lot and we don't even realize that we're going well, on one hand I think I should do this. On the other hand, my urge is to do this and I'm feeling this way because, well, okay, you've already listened to those three parts. So the self is getting input about what's going on. You can also assess part to part dialogues. How does the manager treat the exile? A lot of times we'll see the manager treats the exile the way a caregiver treated the exile, but not always. We want to look at how that relationship happens and we want to make it a healthy relationship. So the manager can nurture the exile and the exile can feel heard. Because all of our experiences contribute to who we are. We want the manager to be able to have a healthy relationship with the firefighter and make sure that that part is there, you know, when they need to use their defense mechanisms. So an example conversation, the manager may say, you better not do that because you know there is no way you can succeed the exile says, I will never get dad's approval because I always fail at everything I do. So the manager. Manager goes, yeah, exactly. So you better not do that because you know you're going to fail and you're going to lose his approval again. And the firefighter is just going, you know, y', all, we just need a drink. Chill out, we need a drink. There's nothing we can do about this situation. The self listening to this dialogue may say, manager, thank you for the warning. I will take that under consideration. I know it's a risk. Can you help the exile think of time she has succeeded because it's really important to me that we try this. It's important to my goals as the self to try this. And firefighter, you don't know that bad things are going to happen. Thank you for being at the ready. So let's talk about what else I can do if this doesn't go how I want so I don't feel overwhelmed. Get the firefighters input ahead of time instead of as reactive. So having a conversation among the parts. Another example, the manager may say, I'm in control. Everything has to go as planned. You know, we have to leave at 7 o'. Clock. We are supposed to be at our destination by noon. Yada, yada yada. The exile says, I remember when I was little and I couldn't fix it. Mom would get really depressed and it's my fault. She was so sad. So if we're late to her birthday party, she's going to be sad again. And yada yada. The firefighter says, they aren't listening. You know, you better start yelling and showing them who's boss or you're going to feel even more out of control. So I'm envisioning in this a parent getting ready to go on a trip and trying to get everybody in the car and packed so they can get to their destination on time. And it's really important to the self in this situation to be on time. So the manager may say, or the self may say, manager, thank you for trying to take such good care of me and help me feel empowered. Exile, it did hurt to see mom struggle so much, but it wasn't your fault. She was so sad. You were too little to do anything. And what's the worst that will likely happen in this situation if I'm not in control if we're late? So asking the exile to really evaluate some of those extreme beliefs. Firefighter yelling is one way to get my point across. And you're right, it does tend to work sometimes, but that's really not how I want to interact with others. How else could I approach the situation? How else could I react? Remember, managers are proactive, firefighters are reactive. So in this situation, the person has started to lose control, firefighter wants to react. We're going to ask for other options besides showing our butt. So when you work with individuals, you want to go back in time with the part to help them unburden. So go back in time to when the child was growing up and their mother was clinically depressed and they felt like, like it was their fault. Ask the exile, what do you wish would have happened? You know, maybe the, the mother was too depressed to be able to pay any attention to the, to the child, you know, whatever the dynamics were. Ask the exile, how would you have wanted it to be? What do you wish would have happened? Ask the manager, what do you think you should have done back then? If the manager is feeling burdened, you can ask them, you know, in that situation, what should you have done? Bring all your parts into the present, you know, exile. They call this retrieval in ifs exile. What is different about you now? You're not that little six year old child anymore. What is different about you now that makes it this situation different or makes you more able to handle this situation? And manager, how are you different now? What new skills do you have that you can help use to protect the self but still allow all, everybody to be heard? Then you can use future imaging with the exile. You can ask them, okay, how do you want this to play out from here on here on out and manager in the future, how can you more effectively deal with situations like this that make you feel like you're out of control and disempowered? Helping them, you know, look at the past, recognize it, address cognitive distortions and figure out how they're different now? You know, very psychodynamic in nature and then looking to the future about, okay, now let's consider this a staff training. In the future, when we experience situations like this, what is each department going to do? The concept of blending, keeping the feelings of the part from overwhelming the self. We want to help the person work with the self to understand why or how not to blend. We don't want the self to merge with the firefighter. So we don't want the CEO to merge with one vice president and they become one entity against the other two vice presidents. That doesn't work. If you've ever been in a work environment where one vice president or one person was sort of the pet, if you will, of the CEO and anything that person wanted, they got. And everybody else was sort of out there going, hello. It's not a healthy system. So we want to work with self to understand why and how not to blend, how to maintain objectivity, and we want to work with each part to help them understand why and how not to blend. If they feel like they're not getting heard or they feel like they're losing trust in the self, how can they communicate that in order to avoid blending? So thinking of back to the example of alcohol addiction, the firefighter and the self have blended in alcohol addiction. They're not listening to the manager or the exiles anymore. It's just like dealing with life on life's terms is not possible. It's too painful. So we want to talk with the firefighter and talk about, you know, that's a lot for you to bear. If you are constantly at the ready and if you are constantly having to put out fires and just never getting any rest, nobody's there to help you to prevent problems or to deal with problems. Think about fire, forest fires, how they, they smolder for a while and it can be exhausting. And this firefighter is just always waiting for another one to pop up. It's exhausting. So you don't want to blend with the self because the self can help take some of that burden off of you. So how do you do that? How do you communicate with the self to say, you know what, I'm starting to feel really overwhelmed. I'm afraid there's going to be a flare up. How can you communicate that? The strengths of the model. It focuses on strengths, the undamaged core of the self, and the ability of parts to shift into positive roles. Recognizing again that the manager is there to prevent and protect. It's there for a reason. Now if it feels like it's the only one doing any work, then you're going to have a problem. Same thing with the firefighter and the exile. If the exile feels like it's not getting heard and nobody is attending to its wounds, then there may be a problem. But if the exile can say, you know, this may be stressful for us because of this experience in our past, just hello, warning, let you know, then the manager can go, okay, let's see how we can prevent that from being stressful. And. And the firefighter can say, and if things start to get too stressful, then we will do X, Y and Z ifs. Language provides a way to look at oneself and others differently Instead of seeing someone as being self destructive. We may see their firefighter being triggered and trying to protect the self and everybody from the exile, from the pain of the exile. There's no such thing as a bad part, just parts that have become extreme. Language encourages self disclosure and taking responsibility for behavior. So if we start giving those parts, we're using language. What did your firefighter want to do? And that's when we start talking about those impulsive behaviors. What did your exile think or want to do? You know, that's the hurt part of you. And people can start taking responsibility for those parts and the self. The CEO can start taking responsibility for the overall functioning of his or her organization and say, okay, I see this department over here struggling right now, so let's figure out what to do. This model provides for an ecological understanding of the entire therapy system, including the therapist. So you're seeing how the client's manager, for example, interacts with the therapist's manager and the therapist's firefighter and the therapist's exile. And you know, maybe the, the firefighter and the client is goading the firefighter and the therapist going, aren't you going to come out and play? You know, what's up with this? There are a lot of different interactions that you may see. And the model respects an individual's experience of the problem. The clients provide the material. This is just a different way of looking at it. That is that for some people makes sense because it's more concrete than a lot of the other theories. The therapist looks at the client's self, the CEO, a co therapist, and trusts the wisdom of the internal system. So we're not going to say that's wrong or that's bad or that's incorrect. We're going to ask them, you know, the self, the co therapist, what do you think the best resolution is? And what are you hearing from the other parts of the family? What are you hearing in there? Because we want to have balance within the family system. Do you hear any one part being overburdened? And then the self as the co therapist can identify those things and then they can work together to resolve the issues. Every person has within them a self, an exile, a firefighter, and a manager, and sometimes more than one of them. Each of these parts has a survival function. One goal is helping parts communicate and not overwhelm each other. We want to make sure that they work together. Again, think about your workplace. If you work with a bunch of other people, you probably have some people that are really good at administrative functions and really good at planning and organization and that kind of stuff. You probably have some people who are really good at doing therapy, and then you probably have other people who are there who have been there through a lot of things and they have memories to share about. Oh, we did it this way once before, and let me tell you, it didn't go so well. They have wisdom that they can bring to it. So it's important to hear all of those voices in order to have a fully functioning system. Each of these parts has a survival function. One goal is helping parts communicate and not overwhelm each other. Another goal is helping the self get back into a position in which it can listen and discern feedback from the parts to determine the best course of action. Generally, when people come into counseling, either they have one part that is fused with the self and is dominant, or they all, all the parts are just arguing constantly and the person's like, I don't know what to do anymore. I give up. I'm completely out of control. So we want to help them, you know, quiet down the discussion and start hearing each part out and learning how to re establish control. If this podcast helps you help your clients or yourself, please support us by purchasing your ceus@allce.com or getting your agency to sponsor an episode. A direct link to the on demand CEUs for this podcast is@allce.com podcastce that's allce.com podcastceus to sponsor an episode of Counselor Toolbox and reach over 50,000 clinicians per week. Go to allce.com Sponsor thank you.